Shifting Gears
by Crimson-Eyed-Angel99
Summary: The Winter Soldier approached Bruce Banner in a coffee-shop in New York, sat down, and stared at the man for a good five minutes. Both of them were used to assessing threats and five minutes wasn't long in Winter Soldier time. "I need to find the captain."
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: obviously, I own nothing. Really.

Idea: 'Can I turn this road trip into a starting gate for Civil War' or 'How Cap 3 could go.'

Note: I've seen both new movies and read Winter Soldier through Captain America Lives! in comic continuity. If Bucky seems out of movie character, that's why. Comic!Bucky is a pottymouth and a fighter. I'm still trying to properly merge them. Don't know yet what the plot will look like on this either. If there is any background ships, it'll be Sharon/Steve and Wintalia but it won't be a central driving force. This story is getting written because the comics haven't given me a Steve and Bucky post-WS conversation yet and it looks like the movies might not either. Enjoy!

###

The Winter Soldier approached Bruce Banner in a coffeeshop in New York, sat down, and stared at the man for a good five minutes. Both of them were used to assessing threats and five minutes wasn't long in Winter Soldier time. Finally, Banner took a breath and leaned forward, setting down the smartphone. Hydra didn't bother to teach him brands, but they had been clear that shiny, oblong devices were for communication and this was one of the most indestructible-looking Bucky had ever seen. He had the right person.

"I know some people who can help with PTSD," Banner said.

The acronym wasn't one he recognized. Then again, his handlers had left out anything they didn't think he needed to know and, apparently, PTSD wasn't a threat to him.

Ignore PTSD. He needed to ask this correctly.

"The punk."

Banner blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You know where the punk is."

Banner stared and it made all the Italian in his features, this man was _European_ and the last Bucky could really remember with what had filtered back in was… muddied. Italians had been good in the war when he died, but good for Axis, and that was bad, and bad in the Cold War, but was that bad for the Soviet or bad for the States, _all the alliances kept changing._

And what did it matter if Banner was Italian? Everybody was something in America. Bucky was something. Some thing.

"Do you know what punk is?" Banner was asking, carefully.

"The captain."

"Ah geez." The man's posture became tighter, he ran a hand through his hair, he shifted uncomfortably.

"What." In turn, Bucky shifted his posture, weapons more accessible, shoulder braced into the window – his metal arm would be able to bust it outwards in a second if it was necessary. When he returned his attention to Banner, the man was staring at him, hand in mid-ruffle.

"Whoa, so, I missed something," Banner said.

"What."

"Why are you all… battle-ready?"

Oh. Fidgeting was probably a social cue for discomfort. Damn, he used to be good at those. Didn't he? Natalia had been good at them. She taught him some he didn't know and he had taught her how to fight. Over and over. Don't lose focus. He shook his head.

"Okay, it's— I'm just kinda… hiding from Stark right now," Banner said, grinning. Tight grin, _nervous_ grin. Okay. Fearful grin? A little. And yet that wasn't alarm.

"I don't need to see the iron man. I need to see the captain." Thank God they were in a world of codenames and monikers. If he had to tell this man he needed to see 'Steve' over and over, it was going to turn into a litany of names: 'Steve,' 'Peggy,' 'Fury,' 'Dugan,' and _everyone he had ever known._

"Yeah, I'm—not the best guy to go to for Avengers calls. Especially… when I'm hiding. Besides, I heard Steve was out in the Midwest doing something for a couple months."

"What state?"

Banner was about to tell him, then thought better of it. "Airports have changed since you were—"

Bucky remembered then, one of the jogged pieces of memory coming to the surface. There had been several missions, recent ones, where he had to get through American security. It got so bad they took off his arm and transported it in a separate agent's carry-on once, just to avoid the notoriety. Still.

"What state?"

"…look, you'd be picked up as soon as you got into an airport."

The Winter Soldier in him began to get annoyed. "I don't care. Follow me, if that soothes your _ing conscience." And sometimes other memories got jarred loose. He remembered parts of how he used to talk in the trenches, maybe how people had spoken around him. His mind felt like a jigsaw built on a sea of lava.

The expletive didn't seem to bother Banner.

"Can't follow you. The big guy has a no-fly radius so wide I had to take a slow boat to Singapore with Enya and Celtic moans." The moment the words left his mouth, Banner rolled his eyes heavenward. "I've been away from the man six months, put me in the same city, and I'm poking _myself._"

"The big guy."

"The—well, you must be the only person in the States that doesn't know about him. The… Hulk. Big green guy?"

"You are a contact of the Avengers, _call the captain._" He was beginning to lose focus on the mission with the way Banner kept dancing around the issue and the memory transience wasn't helping. Then a sliver of paranoia kicked in. Banner knew what he needed to do and wasn't doing it. Banner understood what that would mean. The man wasn't angry or he would be uncontrollable and green and the Winter Soldier would be withdrawing. Which meant Banner had called someone, but it wasn't the captain, and it wasn't going to be anyone Bucky wanted to see.

He stood abruptly.

"What state?" he asked. Demanded. Asked. It was asking when no one was being slammed into a car door, or shot, or at knife point, or garroted, or sniped, or – there were more ways. If only the ways he had rescued people didn't come back and intermingle with the ways he had murdered people. Not all of them were even the Winter Soldier; some were acts during war. Steve's right-hand man with both his hands dripping with gore.

"Barnes. Barnes." Banner had stood on the other side of the table and just finished quietly assuring the people around them that Bucky had just gotten back from deployment a few weeks ago, he was still pretty shook up. People were moving away. Not in a panic, but moving away.

"Barnes, there are people around here, innocent people. You're not on a mission and I'm not trying to hurt you. I called Stark, okay? Avengers ID cards will call Stark Tower when activated."

He hadn't known that. Well, hadn't known technology could do that, which made sense because Hydra worked in basements and bank vaults and in the bottom of snowy ravines and why would they have access to advanced technology?

"Stark is SHIELD," he said. "Not interested in talking to SHIELD."

"After three months ago, who is anymore? Anyway, he'll be able to get you to Steve, one way or another."

Which reminded Bucky of something important.

"You knew my name."

"Hard not to. Even in Singapore, Stark's having Pepper send me messages. 'If you see anyone with a metal arm,' 'who the hell is named Bucky,' 'please dial 999 for traumatized assassin sightings…' and they were worse than that on occasion. So yeah, I know who you are."

Traumatized. Well, that probably wasn't Steve's word for it, it didn't mean it was what Steve thought, even if Bucky wanted to crawl into the hole of the word and die there. His last sighting of his friend had been dragging him out of the wreckage of the helicarrier, having just done to him everything the helicarrier couldn't, and then almost drowning him. Memory loss was no excuse. It didn't feel like he could start moving again until he saw Steve and instead he was sitting here with Banner.

"So you're the Winter Soldier!" came a smarmy voice from behind him and Bucky knew, even before turning, that he didn't like Tony Stark. When he didn't get up, Stark circled the table, nudged Banner as he kept one eye on Bucky. This was an expressive man, professional enough to make wearing a black 'Metallica' shirt and jeans look like a suit.

"Thought he'd be taller," Stark said.

"You thought _I'd_ be taller," Banner said moodily.

"If you asked me out to coffee more often, maybe I wouldn't bring the quinjet when you activate your ID card. And the president would stop breathing down my neck about getting you registered but not everything's about you so HEY, pretty and traumatized, what are you looking for with the big, green, not-Thor's-brother machine?"

That had been a _very_ quick sentence – Stark talked like the younger Hydra scientists. The question demanded a quick comeback and Bucky replied: "I'm looking for the captain" almost before he had processed the request.

The pair glanced at each other. Banner made a 'what can you do' face at Tony.

"He spoke English a moment ago. Barnes?" This was in Russian. "_You switched, can you speak English for the Stark?_"

"_The Stark is obnoxious. If you don't tell me I am going to the airport."_

"You won't be able to get through without documents," Banner said, back in English. "You ditched Hydra. If what Steve's said is true, they don't give you a severance package for that."

"See, and this is where Maria would tell us, 'if he were a registered hero, he could go where he wanted.' And I would get to point out that eyeliner isn't a hero yet."

"Shut up, I'm a veteran," Bucky muttered. It felt clever to say it, even as the words bit back in his throat. He was a veteran of all wars, on all sides, and a prisoner of war and guilty of the greatest war crimes. He had been focusing on this too long. He had an apartment and he should go back there. All right, not an apartment, he slept on the roof of an apartment and had evaded detection for a week now despite the onset of a bone-wracking cough. Cyro had kept him healthy, because who could get sick in a machine, but there had been no medical care after the helicarrier. He still moved with a limp from being pinned under the crashing tower and the jump after the captain. His real concern was what would happen when the arm ran out of charge. It had been whirring, overheating, and exhibited false start-ups a few times since the fight. The cough had come after and, while he wasn't sure what everything in him looked like, he didn't have a lot of upper body mass that wasn't involved with the arm. And the arm's recharge was tied to one of Hydra's machines; if it ran for too long, or he had to use it intensively, it would run out of charge. He couldn't go back, obviously.

"Come back to the tower," Stark said. "Cap'll come running back if he hears you're here."

"And I suppose you'll be wanting me to come along for that," Banner said, defeated before the question was even asked.

"What, you think I'm going to have trouble with My Chemical Romance? Nat's there, she knows him. It should be fine. Jarvis already put in a call to Steve to let him know."

Jarvis. Hydra had thought about taking out Stark once, so at least Bucky knew about the A.I. Still. It would be nice if someone used a real phone once in a while; it would be nice if everything happened… _slower_. 'As fast as possible' in 1945 had been a lot slower than this. He had assumed that being the Winter Soldier was most of the speed; that he was moving faster than everyone because of his training but no, he was moving faster because he only had one stream of thought to run along. Everyone else was texting and jumping tracks and grabbing data and Bucky was point and shoot. He was still the best at his job. Other people were just good at lots of jobs.

"Losing ya, Barnes?" Stark asked and Bucky realized, with some surprise, that he had sat down at some point.

This wasn't going to plan. What the hell was he going to do, ride back to Stark Tower with Stark? Wait for Steve and hope that worked out? Banner understood how unstable that plan would be but Banner wouldn't phone Steve. So, forget Banner, forget Stark.

He stood and, amid Tony's protests, began to leave. He heard the man's tone change as he spoke into his communicator and almost smiled. Like he wouldn't plan an escape route before ever approaching Banner? It wasn't his first time getting in and out of a situation. The only difference was that no one was dead.

Walk round the corner, step into the alley, halfway up a fire escape, climb through the open apartment window, peaceably exit the occupied home before anyone saw him, step into the hallway, take the stairs to the basement, remove the clothes he had prepared from the laundry and dropped behind the machines, and put them on over what he had worn with Banner. Ditch the hat. He had found a ponytail holder earlier and wished he had used it for the meeting. A man with a ponytail was more distinctive than a man with long hair. Solution was to cut it but a bad haircut would be _far_ too distinctive.

He walked until he reached the apartment complex and easily scaled the height. Another eight hours here and he would move. Steve was somewhere in the Midwest and would come back soon. There was always the bird man Steve had been with. Ah. Memory slid in another piece. But he had tried to kill that man, very vehemently, and going to him for help probably wasn't going to result in anything good.

The arm whirred and whined as he settled into a clandestine corner of the apartment complex rooftop. The sound of cooling. Within four hours, it would be absurdly cold and, while he had tried to take it off once to get rid of the freezing technological device, he had been too scared he wouldn't be able to get it on again and stopped. If the arm was off, he was vulnerable. Besides, he probably needed a sterile environment or he risked getting dirt, bugs, or who knew what into his bloodstream.

Failure.

So this first effort had been failure.

###

…if it entertains, tell me, and I'll try to think of how to move it on.


	2. Chapter 2

Still doing this! :)

#

"He was here and you didn't stop him? How did he look?"

Facing an enraged Captain America, fresh off the plane from where he had been monitoring a political rally in Wyoming, wasn't the most concerning thing on Tony's agenda, but it did make the list of concerning things. He spread his hands engagingly.

"Ah, well, I wouldn't put him on with the Kardashians anytime soon, but he looked pretty good. Bruce? Thoughts for Cap?"

"You remember how you looked after the helicarrier," Bruce said to Steve, having gotten himself as far as physically possible from the conflict by working on something in the back of the laboratory, behind lots of breakable screens. "Barnes was that, plus whatever Hydra did to him, and he's sleeping rough."

"Where was he going when he left you?" Steve asked.

The conversation had gone too long without a Stark, so Tony jumped in again: "Going, dunno, but Hawkeye turned up a lead on a rooftop early this morning. Someone scuffling around, we got some footage and, voila," Tony spun the screen he had been pulling up around so the image faced Cap. "Is this your card?"

In the image, the Winter Soldier had taken off his coat and wrapped it around his metal arm, free hand engaged with keeping it from slipping off his shoulder. Tony could tell just from looking at Steve's expression that Cap had decided Bruce's description was more accurate than Tony's.

"When can we pick him up?" Steve asked, turning his attention from the screen.

"Another point we're not sure on. He moved this morning but Hawkeye's trailing him."

"But he'll notice—"

"He hasn't yet, Steve."

That shut Steve up for a moment, thinking of all the reasons an accomplished and talented assassin wouldn't notice that someone was on his tail. Then, shrugging off the worry: "I'm going."

"Last time you saw this guy, he threw you out of a plane."

Steve gestured at the screen, which was rerunning the footage. "Does he look like he could throw me out of a plane now?"

"Why would he seek you out now then? It's been weeks. More than weeks."

"Maybe he remembered something."

"Would he have come after you if he remembered?" Banner asked. Tony only caught the tail end of it, Banner was so quiet, but he could extrapolate the rest. It hit Steve like a brick and then he just… rode it out. Confident as the ocean swallowing a thrown rock.

"Yeah. Buck would come. He'd know that I would want to see him."

"But who knows where he's been," Tony said, flipping the screen to face him again. "Because, heads up Cap, Bucky isn't the only one who wants to put a high-powered weapon in your hand."

Banner stared. "Is… that a joke about shaking hands?"

"This guy is not safe and not stable."

"No, but did you just make a joke about amputees—"

"You don't know him," Steve said fiercely.

"But I met him," Tony interrupted. "And the last time _you_ met him, he kicked the cap outta you. So, Nat's looking into where he's been. Just… chill."

Steve grasped the screen again, pulling it around to study the footage. "On a rooftop."

"Well, yeah, but that was days ago. He could have checked into a hotel by now."

"Negative," Jarvis intoned over the room's invisible speakers. "No one using any of Mr. Barnes' current or former known aliases has checked into a New York-area hotel in the past forty-eight hours."

"Bucky's a sniper. He'll be on a rooftop unless he has a reason to be elsewhere," Steve said with perfect certainty.

"Won't he expect us to think that?" Banner asked, still even-toned. The conversation hadn't interrupted his workflow at all and, not for the first time, Tony envied his concentration.

Steve shrugged with one shoulder and Tony knew that gesture from making it, under the same circumstances. Fear, uncertainty, and desperately covering both sentiments up.

"He might not remember that I know."

#

Assassin.

Well. Yes and no.

Assassins did their own footwork to find people, so Bucky was an assassin only because he killed. You couldn't expect an assassin to be very capable of research when you stuck him in a freezer whenever he wasn't actively killing and handed him materials to kill the moment he got out and then put him back in when he was done. If he started thinking about that though, he was going to end up never leaving this rooftop and that would be a problem because he had done that for sixteen hours already.

Contacting Steve, without revealing himself to Banner or Steve or SHIELD, wasn't possible.

He didn't know where the bird man lived though he could, possibly, rectify that. Maybe.

He had stolen a phone from one of the apartments below but he knew no numbers to put in it. Phones weren't _new _to him, not with Hydra's dependence on them, but any phone without a number was useless.

The police knew who he was, if only by reputation, and wouldn't help him.

And the more he thought about the lack of options, the more they crumbled into paranoia. Hydra knew he was here. Hydra knew and their handlers would be here any moment to pick him up, just like last time. Last time. Last time he had gotten on a train and rode out to Brooklyn and wandered the streets and wasn't sure why until the handlers had shown up dressed as cops and no one could be trusted.

Though he had had some success with giving himself orders. Orders were familiar and could be obeyed without wondering what to do about them.

Get up. He got up.

Go to the stairs. He did.

Go to the street. He went.

Left or right? Where are you going? How are you going to get out of this situation?

He almost went back up to the rooftop when he spotted the incongruous large windows and blocky architecture of a shopping mall, just a street or two over. Big, crowded. It would have bathrooms and be warm. The idea of being indoors appealed to him: his cough and the late October weather were getting along like pigeons in a submarine.

When the automatic doors slid open, a blast of warm air came out and Bucky slipped in, mentally assessing what the orders that got him down here hadn't double-checked. All was in order. The arm was covered by the coat. His glove had been shredded in the helicarrier so his 'hand' was in his pocket. There wasn't much sensation left without the glove – maybe he could pick up another. He had a hat that said 'Veterans of Foreign Wars' though and he looked like he'd seen enough action not to be questioned.

Another order echoed, one from way back: Don't stay in one place.

So, he rode the escalator up and walked around the second level until his leg began complaining about the exercise. Fine. He sat down on one of the benches until the order burned at the back of his brain, then he moved again.

He did this for two hours until he could feel security guards' eyeing him. It rankled. He was master of stealth and he had to wear a _hat _and _limp_ and he had to keep his metal hand in his pocket to hide it, which was making his arm whirr to try and keep itself cool.

They didn't approach. Good. Let them stare.

"My boy, they _are_ going to arrest you for loitering if you don't buy something or clock in somewhere."

A man had come up next to him – big man with an extremely long and extremely red beard. He looked like a shrink or a professor; no, he looked like the kind of arrogant ass you would have to work for and not assassinate. Bucky was surprised at how fast these thoughts came to mind. Did he dislike people like this? Had he worked with people like this? The man kept pace with him. Reply. Respond. Do _something_.

"It's… not illegal to walk," he managed.

"It is with a hand in your pocket. I'm what you might call a consultant to the fine mall cop department here. They've contacted me as they're… concerned."

Bucky didn't say anything. The man's voice was subtle, almost familiar, and it had a way of wrapping itself around words. Did he know this man? He would remember him, wouldn't he? This was not a man you forgot. Neither was Steve, but you managed that just fine, didn't you?

"What are you thinking about?" the man asked.

Say nothing. Say nothing. They were walking past stores he had spent the last hour walking past, yet all unfamiliar. Bath and Body Works, GameStop, a food court – he was starving, but as he veered towards the food court, the man said quietly that Bucky didn't want to go there right now, come back and keep walking. He did. Wait. Why did he though? He was hungry, he didn't know this man.

He began to panic, even as the man changed the subject.

"Now, you've kept your hand in your pocket this whole time. Why is that?"

"…"

"When I say a consultant, I don't mean I turn people over to mall cops. Why don't you take your hand out of your pocket?"

Bucky took his hand out of his pocket. It seemed like the most logical thing to do, like veering away from the food court or allowing this man to keep pace with him. The man looked at the metal hand without surprise, nodded to himself.

"What's your name?" the man asked.

"Can you help me find Steve Rogers."

"Does… Steve… know you're looking for him?"

"Yes."

"Well, James, if you come down to the station with me, I'm sure we can sort that out."

And that made sense too. The man started moving onwards, toward the escalator and there were people waiting at the base. He could see them over the glass siding of the second level. People in uniforms, and they made him nervous.

"Come on, James."

And he was following the man, terrified. Why was he moving towards the escalator?! He didn't want to go with this man and he didn't want to be taken by those people, they would _rewrite him_ and – he pulled back.

"No."

"You will come with me."

But pulling back had worked. Oh, it wasn't that he couldn't feel the man trying to urge him forward – he had almost stepped forward when the man said 'you _will_ come with me,' but it wasn't like the machine. It wasn't like anything Hydra had done. It was simpler. It was coercion. And he could see it.

"I know what you're doing," he said. The words felt like venturing out onto a sheet of ice. Don't laugh, you'll sound hysterical. Still, he was breathing strangely. "I know what you're doing and it _won't_ _work_." Nope, laughing. Giddy. "It won't work!"

"Do you know who I am, James?"

Coughing now—giddy and laughing was a bad combination for the cough and Bucky stabilized himself on the siding. Giddiness faded and he straightened, made sure the hand was still in the pocket.

"No. But you're not…" His head swam; he tried to clear the cough from his throat. "You're not… them."

"Yet I know what was done to you. And expertly, I might add. Why would Hydra allow you to reconnect with Steve Rogers?"

"Hydra doesn't know—"

"Come now. They know exactly where you are. They have implanted trigger words in your head for just this kind of moment. So, I'll ask you again as a friend, why would Hydra allow you to reconnect with Steve Rogers?"

"Shut up."

Trigger words. Good God, he hadn't even thought of them but they existed, didn't they. This man knew about them. And look at what he had been programmed to do; what would he do with things they had implanted in him? He moved around the man, only to hear him say:

"Stop, James. The fight isn't in you."

And suddenly the man was dead on the ground and Bucky was backing away. Oh God. That wasn't a Winter Soldier killing, his mind screamed, that was you. What did you do; there are people here. _What the f_ kind of ghost are you?!_

He lunged over the edge of the railing and landed correctly on some sort of sculptured feature, directly below. Get out of here. Get out. The mall cops didn't have guns here but they were running towards him and frantically calling backup. People were screaming. He ran.

Outside, there was the blur of angry police sirens approaching from the street. Melt into the background, what is the background; it was still cold out here but the arm was warm again.

Stop. You're not in Winter Soldier gear. They're looking for a man in a hat and a coat and at least one glove. He kept walking, ditching glove and hat and coat, then shoved the metal hand into a pocket.

_Holy f_ing hell, you just killed someone again and you're walking away. What would the man on the bridge think? He'd think this is you, this is you, this was always you._

He kept walking north until he hit the City's midtown area and could see Stark Tower pitched up against the sky. Time to turn around and head south again, until he hit the water. Neither trip took very long, or helped him figure out what to do next. They just made the limp worse and, as the sun went down, his cough followed suit.

He had been too long on the ground, so he scaled one of the apartment buildings and found it occupied, so he climbed down again. This area had more homeless people and fewer secure areas, though it was well-lit by the splendor that was Stark Tower.

That was really how he thought of it. Splendor. Manhattan was disturbingly complex, but Stark Tower always glowed. The Statue of Liberty hadn't changed in any way he could notice. Everything up here was a sight because he didn't have the pressure of seeing it through the lenses of a mission, or with an eye on the time.

Televisions blared in the window of one of the stores and Bucky paused to look up at it. It was a report on the bird man – the Falcon, Sam Wilson – and advertising him as the most eligible bachelor in Harlem. Harlem.

Harlem was… not terribly far from here.

###

...yup. Did a lot of Google Mapping to figure that one out, having never been to NYC and having only a middling knowledge of Marvel placement/geography. Annnd sorry bout the Faustus.


	3. Chapter 3

#

It had been the kind of day where ending it was the best part.

Counseling veterans with PTSD didn't come with hours attached, so Sam had spent the last three (11pm to 2am, if anyone was counting) talking to a twenty-two year old who had just come back and found out the girl he had been 'getting serious about' when he left got pregnant. It wasn't his. And he was on a mile-long waiting list for another doctor's appointment and the doctor's assistant was a [expletive expletive] ho-bag. And his father had cancer and what the [expletive] are you supposed to do about that, man?

Sam had talked him out of binge-drinking the pain away (or at least, as close as Sam could come to being sure of that), got some food in him, and listened. Promised to make calls in the morning, made sure the soldier was stable enough to get to his door, and sent a follow-up text as he was walking away, reminding the soldier of what was going to happen now.

Thank God Steve was on a month-long break from the Find Bucky Road Trip. It was disorienting for soldiers to switch counselors, even when Parham, the replacement, was qualified and did the best he could. Trust didn't jump from person to person like that.

Shifting the bag of McDs to one hand, (yes, it was terrible, but he would run in the morning) Sam went to unlock the sliding door of his house. Wait. Nope.

Setting down the paper bag, he took the steel baseball bat from the garden and went around to the window. The window was a calculated security risk – it led into a storage room and could be jiggled open. The door to the storage room was locked from the inside. Sam jiggled open the window, climbed in, and unlocked the door with the key. He opened it slowly, checking for flashlights in the house.

None yet, but something was off.

He moved quickly towards the kitchen, where he had seen the shadow. At an angle, based on the light from the outside, there was a boot on the floor. Shifting, he quietly set down the bat, grabbed the gun from behind the toaster, and pointed it at the intruder. The man didn't move. Rising to a standing position, he took partial cover behind the wall.

"I'm not running a hotel."

"Sam." The man said the name reflectively, trying it out. The voice wasn't familiar.

"If we have an appointment, I don't remember."

Silence again, so Sam moved into range of the light switch and flipped it on. The fluorescent gleam should have made the intruder flinch, recoil, something, but he just sat there, hands on the table. Hand—on the table. The other thing was tarnished metal and shone in the unnatural lighting. Sam kept the gun up, moving around the far side of the kitchen. He had to move carefully around this guy.

"Hey."

The intruder didn't respond the first two times he said it. The third time, he tacked on: "Hey. Soldier."

Steve's friend looked up. He looked lost, mask-free, eyeliner-free, with healing bruises and unkempt hair.

"You a vet?" Sam asked. An expression of cringing, deep loss came into the man's eyes and he ducked his head. After a minute, he nodded.

"Okay. Hey. Hey."

After another minute, the intruder looked up again, making uncomfortable eye contact because it was, he was learning, the only way Sam was going to have a conversation with him.

"That's good," Sam said. "Cause I help vets."

The intruder broke eye contact and looked away into Sam's hallway and living room as if either of them were going to help him with this conversation.

"But there's a problem," Sam said. Eye contact flickered back again, wary. "You are also homicidal and tried to kill one of my good friends. Are we gonna have a problem?"

The intruder didn't break eye contact, not exactly, but he stared down at the kitchen table in kind of a numb horror. Saying 'hey' a couple of times didn't bring him back, so Sam let him sit and began making eggs until the guy pulled himself together enough to answer. Sometimes people did better when they didn't feel you were waiting on them. Still, his back was never fully on the man and he had confidence in his draw on the gun.

Nah, he reflected unhappily, that wasn't it. If the Winter Soldier wanted him dead, he would probably be dead. Steve wouldn't get here fast enough, even if Sam called him right now. The police wouldn't show up for a good thirty minutes after he placed. In Harlem, as a superhero, you knew. That was right. It was 2am and he was a superhero.

A sound like a toaster falling off the top of the fridge stirred him from his thoughts. He turned around to see the intruder stabilizing himself with his other hand. Where the metal arm had been, there was just a gaping circle fused to his left shoulder. The man looked tired and deeply worried, glancing at the floor and then, seeing Sam looking at him looking at the floor, gave up and reached over to cover the circle where the arm had been.

"Okay," Sam said. "So no killings right now. If that dented my floor though, you're paying for it."

The intruder blinked, reached into his pants pocket (Sam gripped the handle of the frying pan, thought about the placement of the gun), and pulled out a wallet (all tension relaxed).

"How did you find my house?" he asked.

"Phone book," the intruder/Steve's friend/the currently-not-homicidal-master-assassin said.

"My name is _Sam Wilson_, how did you—"

There was something of a person in the reply, a bit more intonation than Sam had seen coming.

"'Most eligible bachelor in Harlem.'"

Ah. Right. That interview. More accurately, that journalist _conducting_ the interview; he would have given her his number, home address… hell, she could come over anytime. Instead, he got Bucky.

"You come looking for Steve?"

A nod.

"Well, we don't live together, man."

"Should. He needs someone, he'll get into… fights…" Bucky stared numbly at the table again for a moment, shut his eyes in concentration for another longer moment, and then said quietly: "At the mall in… in Manhattan."

"You were there?" Expletives ran across Sam's mind, though he had trained many of them out by now; expletives were too good at setting off the people he worked with. Bucky was nodding, not making eye contact but more conversational than he had been in the past fifteen minutes, addressing the cabinets with a fixed attention.

"I was talking with a man and he was talking about trigger words and then he was dead."

"You remember killing him?" Sam asked, tone level as a carpenter's tool. Bucky shook his head like a kid trying to get out of a punishment.

"I don't remember." He looked up directly into Sam's eyes and said clearly: "I remember all of them and I don't remember killing him."

Blink and the eye contact broke again, unsure and twitchy.

"All right. I believe you," Sam said and put a plate on the table in front of the man. "There's food if you want it. You don't have to eat it if you don't want to. What I'm going to do is have you come with me to the living room and leave the arm here. We gonna have a problem with that?"

Bucky shook his head and shifted oddly – trying to pick up the plate with the arm that wasn't there, Sam realized. Bucky quickly compensated, switching to the other hand and using the momentum to stand, carefully stepping over the arm.

Sam sat him down on the couch and found a specialty music station that played Glenn Miller, jazz, swing. Stuff that might be somewhat close to what Bucky knew and Steve always seemed to prefer. Blankets were visible on top of an ottoman in the corner, but Sam took a few over to the couch anyway and let Bucky see him doing it.

"Two rules. You don't leave the house without telling me. You don't enter any of the houses in the area if you do leave. If you can't keep one, keep the other."

Bucky nodded, making his way through the mess of eggs, cheese, and everything else Sam had thrown in. He was practically ambidextrous anyway, being a master assassin, and if the imbalance of his arm threw him off, he didn't telegraph it much.

Sam went into the kitchen and sighed. The station was crooning 'Moon River' and he would have killed to listen to some Marvin Gaye right now. He called Steve and the man picked up after one ring.

"You win, Sam, it's too early to go jogging."

"This is the only time I can beat you, come on."

"What's going on?"

Sigh. "I got your friend on my couch."

The other end of the line got very quiet for a moment.

"Got back from a session, he was waiting for me. Looking for you, looks like hell, but he took off the arm so I'm guessing he's willing to talk."

"That's—great. Sam."

"Steve, he says he killed that guy in the Manhattan mall today. I can't go to sleep with him in the house, can't kick him out."

"I'm on my way. Did you call Tony?"

"Tony doesn't know this guy."

"Good, don't."

When Sam came out, Bucky was asleep, buried under all the blankets (not just the ones Sam had moved, the entire contents of the ottoman were spread over him). Keeping an eye on him, Sam grabbed one of the blankets and went to the base of the stairs. Thank God they were carpeted. Keeping phone and gun in arms' reach, he sat down, texting Steve to say the sliding door was unlocked.

There weren't a lot of more dangerous people who could get in anyway.

39 minutes passed before the great shadow of the super soldier filled the kitchen doorway. Sam flashed his cell phone in welcome and the big man came over, very quietly. They communicated via passing the phone back and forth. Steve had seen the arm on the floor, was worried if it would do something to Bucky health-wise; Sam confirmed that Steve was going to be able to stay up the whole time – and then went to sleep.

You could worry about people; you could do things in the dead of night and run yourself ragged, but sometimes you had to sleep.

#

This is my favorite chapter and oh my God I'm sorry I love Sam now lots. Thank you to everyone who is reading, commenting, and following. I really appreciate it and hope this entertains.


	4. Chapter 4

gah, merging Buckys is damn near impossible. Working on it!

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Sam woke up because someone had kicked him hard in the hip and when you woke up like that, it was a good idea to get away fast. He somersaulted, which got him halfway to the other side of the living room, and gave him time to check the hip damage during the roll. Not bad enough to incapacitate but it hurt.

The Winter Soldier stood in the center of the room, a smoking gun with a silencer in one hand – only until Steve hit him at the torso, carrying him backwards. Without the arm, the Winter Soldier weighed much less, landing with a grunt. Steve pinned him easily.

"Sam, you okay?" he asked, without looking up.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm cool."

"Hey Buck," Steve said to the snarling Winter Soldier. "Everything's okay."

"He wasn't like this last night," Sam said. The Winter Soldier struggled, pushing upwards, but there wasn't much he could do with Steve sitting on him. At least some of that muscle was weight and there was a lot of muscle.

Steve was still watching the man, brow knitted in concentration.

"Everything's going to be fine," he said. The super soldier in him was starting to give way to confusion. Hurt. "Come on, Buck."

"The fight isn't in you," the Winter Soldier said and he twisted with surprising speed, managing to get Steve off him and a knife out of a pocket of the coat. Both were standing now, tensed for a fight.

"Steve—" Sam said warningly.

"Bucky, there's no need to do this. You know me, you came to Sam's house—"

Any further dialogue stopped as the Winter Soldier rushed the super soldier. Steve side-stepped, grabbed at the arm, missed it and almost fell as the Winter Soldier dropped to sweep his leg around. Instead, Steve managed to jump the sweep and grab the arm. He squeezed until the knife dropped. Then he pinned the Winter Soldier again.

"What's that mean, 'the fight isn't in you'?" Steve asked, catching his breath. "You've been fighting this whole time, _you don't need to fight any more."_

"Soldier," Sam said, approaching just close enough to move the knife out of reach. The Winter Soldier looked at him, then back at Steve, intent. "Hey. Hey."

Eye contact.

"Sit-rep," Sam said firmly.

"Completing mission."

"What mission?"

Eye contact broke, wavered a little. All intonation died: "The fight isn't in you. Kill messenger. Kill Rogers."

"Abort mission. Directives changed," Sam said immediately. "Do not complete mission."

"Confirmation number."

Sam glanced at Steve, who just shrugged. He didn't know any confirmation number, but the Winter Soldier was _responding_. Sam didn't want to tap out here for the sake of a forgotten number. From where he was sitting, he could see numbers inscribed on inside of the circular arm slot, like a product code.

"#6002010 dash 110," he read, hoping and praying it was the right one.

"Confirmed. Mission aborted." The Winter Soldier stopped struggling. There was a long moment of stillness from all of them. Steve looked down at his friend and then over at Sam. Mouthed "…thank you" with an expression that left no doubt he had been lost in the situation. It was the second time he had tried to bring Bucky back after the helicarrier and Sam knew from subtle hints after their jogs that the incident still haunted Steve.

"Bucky?" Steve said. The Winter Soldier had closed his eyes but, at the name, they opened again. A strange moment passed where the man appeared to be deciding how to react. The pinned man seemed to scan through emotions, unable to choose just one to present but knowing something had to be said.

"…Steve," he said finally.

The name carried life; it carried the spirit and personality of someone behind it. Someone with confidence and strength, someone who sounded like he had never been anyone's puppet. The super soldier stared down at his friend as if he had lost all trace of time and weight and the fact he was still pinning the other man to the ground like a threat. Sam stared because the two personalities just didn't correlate.

The man speaking wasn't the man who had spoken to him the night before and that didn't make sense.

"It's me," Steve said.

The man seemed to take heart in that, though he still laid there like an automaton.

"Just couldn't find something to do after the war, Steve?"

—an automaton trying to joke.

"Saving you," Steve replied automatically, trying to be funny, trying to be _normal_. The confident persona staggered and retreated. That haunted look came back into the other man's eyes. The rasp that followed sounded more like the man Sam had spoken to the night before.

"There isn't anything left to save."

"_There is_. You're here. I'm here, Sam's here."

Eye contact, briefly, flicking to Sam then towards the kitchen where his arm still lay, then back to Steve. It was a moment where it felt like the man would smile, if he still knew how, but there weren't enough pieces left for the jigsaw to emerge.

"You don't need winter, Steve," Bucky said.

"_I need you_."

"Tell us about yesterday," Sam said, because this could spiral downwards quickly. Men couldn't be won back to living through a couple of inspirational words, namely made up of Steve saying what he believed with all his heart. It worked in wartime; in peacetime, people just had to figure out how to live.

"Yesterday?" Bucky said. "I don't…"

"The mall in Manhattan. Someone died and you were there."

"I don't remember…"

"You said 'the fight isn't—'" Steve began and Sam clapped a hand over the other man's mouth to prevent him completing the phrase. This had the unfortunate effect of alarming the Winter Soldier. Suddenly Sam was the one pinned, the man's single but _strong _hand at his throat. Looking up though, this was Bucky. The steel in the man's eyes didn't come from any facility.

He thought he was defending someone and he was damn well going to do it right.

"What do you think you're doing," Bucky asked.

"It's a trigger," Sam choked as Steve removed the other man's hand from his throat. "You've tried to kill Steve both freaking times someone's said it."

Bucky twisted free of Steve's grip (the man let him, Sam was sure) and sat very still, thoughts whirring behind the numb stare. Steve glanced over at Sam again, apologetic, but not moving from Bucky's side. This was going to be a problem, Sam could tell, but they had always known that.

"You said the man yesterday was talking about trigger words," he said. "You think this could be one've them?"

"…I don't remember killing him. That's all I know."

"Did he say it?"

"You think I know?" Bucky said, a snarl brewing in it. "My brain looks like a f_ing radio going in and out."

"He's asking a question, Buck."

Bucky looked over at the super soldier and the look held layers of complexity. _Why aren't you on my side? Am I wrong? What the hell am I without –_ Weariness kicked in and Sam could see the man's inclination to participate slipping further and further away. This was difficult and, more than that, it was embarrassing. Memories should be easy to find and, when murders were the one thing that came easily, it was terrifying to have one you couldn't remember. It called everything into question.

"Security footage would show it better," Sam said, more to Steve than the man Steve was still restraining.

"Yeah, Tony'll have that by now," Steve agreed, then glanced towards the kitchen. "We'll need him to get the arm reattached too. You up for a field trip, Bucky?"

"Been following you years, why would I stop now," the man said gamely but, as Steve got up, Bucky didn't; the position on the floor had bent him up and moving to stand had incited a coughing fit. One that… wasn't ending. Sam was far enough away he didn't have to worry about the Winter Soldier attacking again, but it wasn't even an option.

"Maybe driving would be easier," Steve said. Bucky shook his head, the coughing too severe for him to speak for another few seconds.

"Planning on leaving a lung on my carpet?" Sam asked, more concerned than joking. Another minute of this and he would try to give the man water, never mind that Bucky had tried to kill him a minute ago. The man tried to speak through the cough, holding together the last shreds of the confident persona.

"The iron man—would love—that. Lungs're… mine—" Speech died in his throat, becoming just coughing, single hand braced on the floor.

"Stark could send a car," Steve said as Sam stood to get water.

"…Barton," Bucky managed.

"Barton? What's Barton got to do with—"

"Why you gotta ruin a man's stealth ego?" Clint said from the doorway. Both Sam and Steve looked up—Bucky's coughing had obscured all sound of the archer's entry. "Don't bother calling, car's coming around the corner."

"He knew?" Sam asked, more out of irritation than inquiry. He had been in here with the ghost of the intelligence community all night and Stark had done _nothing_?

"Stark would've sent thirty suits and a tank to pick him up. I knew and Nat knew. We're good."

Clint glanced at the dissembling man on the floor, then at Sam and Steve. "So… he's not?"

Bucky had stopped coughing but he had also stopped moving. Steve touched him on the shoulder and the Winter Soldier didn't respond. Said his name—then repeated it several times. No response.

Clint stood in the doorway and watched, the blonde man's expression getting nearer and nearer to concern. Sam knew what it was like to spend the night doing surveillance and it showed in the shadows under Clint's eyes. Everyone had had a long night.

"Steve, you can get him to the car?" Sam asked.

"He's not—he'll be—Buck, you want to get up?" Steve began the sentence to Sam then broke it off and directly addressed his friend.

Sam could see the signs like a readout: eye contact was gone, body language was confined, in short Bucky didn't feel any more secure here than he would have in a Hydra facility on the wrong end of a needle. It might have happened when Clint walked in; it might have been the coughing fit. Somewhere, the confident façade had taken too much of a beating to continue and what Bucky was—what he _really_ was now—shone through.

Watching Steve figure it out was like watching a Labrador try to find its way up a too-high flight of stairs, searching this way and that for an opening but finding walls at every corner.

"We should go, Buck. Stark will be able to get the arm back on and… we can figure things out from there."

When Steve said his name, the Winter Soldier pushed himself smoothly to his feet, slipped past Clint and went into the kitchen. Metal grated on the floor as he picked up the arm. It was a mission and he could handle missions, Sam felt. Steve followed his friend, the super soldier's size big and yet powerless. No eye contact here.

"He'll help with the trigger words. I'm not going to give up."

Bucky's vacant stare flickered for a moment, shifting to the fridge instead of the cabinets, but no less intent. He gripped the arm tighter, then, as if he came to an agreement with himself, the intensity slipped away.

"…yeah."

#

Thank you to anyone who has made it this far with me.


	5. Chapter 5

Thank you for the reviews, Qweb and Savvycali! And to everyone who has favorited or followed this little drabble. And holy crap, I didn't realize this chapter got as long as it did until FF tallied the word count. Hi, 2600 word count, been a while...

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Bucky knew that Steve had been relieved when he said 'yeah,' instead of the silence Bucky wanted to maintain. Steve's relief was why he had said it.

However, it relieved no one that he tried to assume a prisoner of war position after he sat in the car. Even unconsciously, he was worrying people. Every mission he had been expected to ride with his hands behind his head, safe and incapable of killing his handlers. He was pretty sure he had done something to deserve the reputation, but he didn't remember. Every murder was clear in his mind, yes, but the contexts weren't.

Anyway, he was one-handed right now so the position didn't work anyway. Improvisation was difficult, but he put the arm across his lap, held onto it with the other hand, and tried not to look threatening. Steve was walking a line by bringing him in; he could feel it in the rest of the van. The fear, tension, more powerful than actually holding a gun, and the feeling that most of them were glad his arm was off.

Bucky, by contrast, tried not to shiver. Sam had stayed behind and he missed the man's calming presence. Steve was his friend but Sam was… Sam was calming. Sam didn't give the impression that everything could break loose at any moment, while Steve gave the impression that if it _did_, Bucky would be safe.

Getting into Stark Tower in Barton's van was much easier than entering through the front door. Steve did insist on carrying the arm, for security's sake, and Barton patted him down for weapons before they let him out. Two more knives, a gun, and three daggers. He voluntarily gave up the sedation capsule and the poison capsule.

"Stark will probably want to do a scan the minute we get in anyway," Steve said. Bucky nodded. Stark probably would.

"Are you okay with this?" Steve asked. Bucky looked over at the man—the earnest, inquisitive face over the mass of leadership and muscle. Steve was in plainclothes but he never really put away the uniform of the Captain. He wanted confirmation. Bucky didn't want to tell him that he just wanted orders, at this point, not questions on how he _felt_ about _things. _Everything he felt was probably wrong anyway.

Instead, he nodded.

JARVIS deemed his arm safe, as long as it was detached, so they took the long elevator ride up to Stark's lobby.

"He's a bit…" Steve began. "He's a bit of an ass."

"We've met," Bucky said.

"And he's probably going to try and get you to… well, I don't want to hypothesize, but—"

He had to ask.

"What should I do?"

Steve looked up, startled out of his thoughts. A quell of fear went through Bucky's stomach. It was something Bucky—Steve's version of Bucky—never would have asked and he had just asked it. Requested orders.

"Don't agree to join SHIELD," Steve said after a moment. "And don't agree to join the Avengers… yet."

"Is that all?"

"Well, I don't know what you… want…" the super soldier hedged. Bucky bit back the words 'that makes two of us,' and tried to think of anything he needed to ask Steve, the one person he could trust in all of this. Stark certainly wasn't going to explain things for him but he needed Stark to get the arm reattached. He couldn't run from here.

The elevator door opened and they stepped out into the lobby – or maybe it was Stark's living room. Hard to tell with all the windows and couches and the full bar waiting against the wall, but Bucky was guessing 'receiving area.' The iron man not-currently-in-iron was standing in front of a laptop with at least a dozen clear screens flickering in front of him. The windows had been dimmed to the perfect lighting for this task – Bucky had no idea how. Instead, JARVIS politely introduced them from invisible speakers somewhere overhead.

"Captain America, Hawkeye, and James Buchanan Barnes to see you, sir."

"His arm's broken, isn't it," Stark said without turning. Steve glanced at Bucky, then back at the obnoxious prick.

"That matter?"

"Well, seeing as he gave me the brush-off last time we met and that thing's running on some rip-off ARC reactor which is bound to go kaput without a charge, I'm guessing it's the only reason you're back." He turned around. "Oh, look. I'm right."

"The arm is fully operational," JARVIS intoned.

"Oh. Well then." Stark took a measured step back. It wasn't fear though; assessment, pinpointing weapons in the room, monitoring Bucky's stance.

"I took it off," Bucky said with some pleasure. Pleasure. That was odd. Still, the situation felt more controlled here; with Steve at his side, Stark wasn't as terrifying as he had been before. As long as he could keep some thread of respect tied between him and Stark, Bucky could control this.

"And you can't get it back on," Stark said. Steve took umbrage at this and Bucky looked over at him, puzzled. He hadn't read anything in Stark's tone, but Steve had and changed the subject, abruptly, to something Bucky had little memory of.

"Did you learn anything about the man in the mall?" Steve asked.

"Funny you should ask, because that ties into the man with the metal arm. The man in the mall was Dr. Johann Fennhoff, otherwise known as Dr. Faustus. Austrian, psychiatrist, and despite looking like this—" A picture came up on one of the screens, featuring the red-bearded large man from the mall. "He can speak and get just about anyone to do what he says. Part-magician, part-psychoterrorist, which is a hell of a term for something I just made up."

"Who did he work for?" Steve asked, looking at the image.

"'Did' isn't the right word. His body vanished from the morgue. NYPD searched his apartment and, under SHIELD instructions, gave his files to me for review. I'm Hill's top guy right now. JARVIS?"

"Sir?"

"Remind me to tell Hill that."

"Yes, sir."

"Anyway, I found lists. Faustus has been collaborating with Computer Zola for years and they did not get along, but Faustus programmed some newer data into…" And here even Stark got quiet. It hung over the room, Stark's silence, because it didn't seem like something that happened often. This was not a man who often felt the pressure of awkward, or let it sit like this.

"Bucky," Steve said, very quietly. "But if he worked on it, why would he say a trigger that would get him killed?"

"It's possible he didn't think it would work, because that was one of Zola's orders, programmed _after_ the man had died. Faustus had to go to a lot of effort to get it inputted."

Effort. Effort and the trigger order. When he knew the context, Bucky could go back into his mind and find some of the memories relating to it. He remembered all the killings and that meant he remembered killing a lot of random people who gave him the code – the 'messengers,' over and over and over. And in the context of the messengers, he remembered the training missions. Completing the training missions and executing the targets. Targets which invariably looked like… Steve.

Sudden nausea turned his stomach. He would complete a training mission and then he would kill someone who looked like Steve. He had killed people who looked exactly like Steve dozens of times, training himself to kill Steve –

And yet in the helicarrier he hadn't.

Steve was the only person who deserved to live then? What about all the men doing as they were ordered, playing 'Steve' so he would have a trigger phrase imprinted on what little brain he had left? _What kind of screwed morality lets you kill dozens and not kill one?_

"I didn't…" he murmured, trying to keep as quiet as possible. "I didn't know, I didn't, I… didn't…"

Stark hadn't noticed, but Steve was glancing at him with concern.

"On the lists I found, that trigger had 12 red stars next to it. I'm assuming they tested it 12 times. But stuff like this one—it has 48—has been more thoroughly tested."

"Which one—"

Stark said 'the centerpiece can be recycled' and everything… blacked.

Bucky moved and it was muscle-memory from the second he went into motion, metal in hand. Flipping switches, cables, locks—fifteen seconds later he found himself with the arm reattached, pointing a gun at Stark and _he didn't even know where the gun had come from. _

"Bucky—" Steve put his hand on top of the metal arm and pushed it down, gently. Bucky let the gun come down. His hand shook.

"I-I… I…"

He followed the path of his arm to the ground until he was kneeling. The arm was reattached and he had no memory of how he had even learned to do it, much less the process he had followed in the last 15 seconds to attach it.

"Problem solved?" Stark asked—but it was gentle. Everything was gentle right now, everything touched with delicacy like a piece of lace dragged over a rooftop that should tear it to bits.

Using his other hand, he touched the arm. It fit seamlessly at the shoulder, no buckles or cords hanging off. He know how to do it and do it well.

"The list is triggers. Banner translated most of it before he went incommunicado, so I knew what that one would do."

And he hadn't felt like saying? Stark had made him an experiment, conducted an experiment, in front of Cap, Barton, and whatever else was surveying him here, and hadn't felt like telling him. It was against his will. It didn't matter if it was something that needed doing, something he wanted done anyway; he hadn't wanted to attach his own arm, not like that.

"Get them out."

Really, that wasn't what he wanted to say. He had an elite set of skills and right now he wanted to practice all of them on Stark's smug, intelligent face. Not so smug now though—Stark looked surprised. Surprise was bad; it meant that the man would be asking for clarification in a minute, trying to tell him that he had been weaponized and taking trigger words out of his brain wasn't going to be as simple as defusing a bomb.

Preemptively, he felt himself shutting down. Parts of his mind that had been active deciding that now was a good time for a holiday and turning out the lights of memory as they went.

"Get them out," he repeated, because it was the most recent thing he had said, it was important, and they weren't arguing with it.

"We need the guy you killed," Stark said, gesturing at the red-haired psychiatrist's picture. "I'm not just going to start mucking about in there."

A mission. It was a mission then.

"Briefing." The word used for requesting more intel. They would hand him a packet from time to time, because he wasn't a child; they could trust him to follow the mission plan. That was a briefing. The iron man hadn't prepared a briefing.

"Under Maria Hill's orders, you can't leave this building until SHIELD clears you," he said, collapsing all the screens into one laptop with a wave of the hand.

"He can't get SHIELD clearance until we get this guy," Steve interjected.

"I had a meeting with Hill five minutes ago and got clearance. Now, I've got to get to the meeting with Hill. Get him set up somewhere secure and don't let him watch the news. JARVIS knows better too." He handed off the list to Steve and, thank God, said nothing else that Bucky could hear.

He hadn't watched the news in years anyway, not unless he was undercover and didn't have a choice. But if he couldn't watch the news, he was probably _on_ the news. The man at the mall was probably on the news.

"The name," he said quietly, glancing up from the floor, but Steve had gotten pulled into conversation with Stark. Barton was looking at him, but said: "Dr. Faustus" with a guarded air. Dr. Faustus. Armin Zola. Trace it, think back through it, ignore everything around the memories, just find Dr. Faustus. Figure out who he might be, where he might be.

Blank walls. Blank memories everywhere he looked

He could do better.

"Bucky." It sounded like the name had been said several times and someone was getting impatient. He only truly came to himself when he felt Steve grip his human shoulder. He glanced up.

"Stark's sending a nurse and he wants to do a full eval later. Do you think you can handle a nurse?"

Agree. That's what he was supposed to do in this situation. What Steve wanted. Instead, he shrugged with one shoulder, which dislodged Steve's hand. _Not_ what was wanted. He wanted to ask about the man from the mall again. The red-haired man from the mall. The… the doctor? The red-haired doctor from the mall that he had…

Steve had the list in one hand. It was crumpled up in his fist, right now, but he had the list in hand.

"Don't."

He didn't want to look at the super soldier. His friend. Super soldier. Man on the—damn it, he needed more sleep.

"It's so I don't say them," Steve said, quietly. "It's a copy."

Copy. There were more of the lists. How many people knew the words? Had memorized the words? How many of his former handlers were running around with this knowledge in their heads, people just waiting for him to try and address his dozens of assassinations so they could set him up for another one?

"Don't," he repeated.

"Stark's an ass," Steve said, reaffirming what he had said earlier. "…you remember Namor?"

No. He didn't. He wished he did, so he nodded and watched the floor. Their shoes were different. Steve wasn't in uniform, so the sneakers he wore were running shoes. White (or they had once been white before saving the day got at them) and with sad-looking laces. In contrast, Bucky's boots were scuffed, marked with water damage, mud, and several tears in the fabric from the tower. He had meant to switch them out, but it was harder to obtain new shoes than it was to get hat, shirt, pants, and coat. People were weird about shoes and underwear and socks. There were some things you were only supposed to buy if you had a home to take them back to.

Steve hugged him by the shoulder. In the pressure of his fingertips was a life of courage and confidence. Even if he hadn't always done the best thing, Steve did the Right Thing. Steve would lay down his life for the American people and as far as he was concerned, Bucky still was one of them.

"It's gonna be okay," Steve told him.

No, it wasn't. Not until they finished the mission, got the trigger words out of his head, not until they dealt with this enormous problem he was making for Steve just by existing, just by refusing to die when he should have.

He nodded anyway.

#

I feel like I should apologize for the meandering of this story (it's one of my rare didn't-plot-this-out-fully-in-advance ones) but, as is, I'm just grateful for reviews and anyone who wants to read it. 3 Thank you.


	6. Chapter 6

Full disclosure: I read imaginebucky prompts on tumblr. I am not trying to steal or emulate/imitate anything written there, but stuff that I read gets in my head. The tumblr is not affecting the plot, motivations, or interactions of the characters, but I know that there may be some ideas between here and there and wanted to acknowledge. : )

#

Steve kept talking about Namor as JARVIS directed them down to living quarters, which perplexed Bucky beyond anything else. A tower should not accommodate residential living. He didn't have much time to think about it because Steve kept talking.

Namor – otherwise known as the Sub-Mariner and a prince of Atlantis, and an arrogant jerk while he was a good man to have at your back. The Human Torch, Steve went on – a man they had worked with several times who could ignite himself without burning to death or experiencing pain. Steve named them, others, the entire group of the Howling Commandos and Bucky recalled a handful.

That was… sort of good. At least he hadn't killed them.

He lost track of where they were going, trying to keep up with Steve's dialogue, and only stopped when JARVIS directed them to a closed door.

"These will be your quarters, Mr. Barnes, for the period of your stay at Stark Tower. You will have noticed you passed through several fortified doors, but I have been instructed to remind you of it. These door will be locked."

_That_ took no explanation. "So I can't leave."

"For the time being." The door ahead of them clicked as a bolt slid out of place. "Enter."

Steve glanced at him, then pushed the door open and they stepped into the largest bedroom Bucky had ever been assigned. It wasn't the largest he had ever _seen_—several missions had required that he enter bigger, more lavish bedrooms, but it was the biggest he had ever had. The bed was in the main room and it took only a glance to know he wouldn't be sleeping in it tonight. Or ever.

"Clothes have been ordered and should be waiting by the time you finish cleaning," JARVIS said.

And there was a shower, bigger than the ones he had been slipping in and out of the YMCA to use and this one was private. Steve made a concerned noise as Bucky stood in the bathroom doorway, looking in.

He didn't look back at Steve. Looking was going to mean that he understood why the noise was made, when the questions were already running around his head. _Can you take a shower, what if you slip and fall, what if you forget where you are and demolish the glass door, what if you forget about JARVIS and try to beat the speaker to death with the showerhead?_

Instead he channeled Steve's Bucky and said the most arrogant thing he could think of: "I'm a master assassin, I think I can shower without…"

—what was it called when people fell like that? He knew what it looked like, like round-housing the sky, like kicking at a football and missing–

"…banana-peeling on the floor."

"Banana-peeling?"

"Go away. The sky-voice told me to take a shower." It wasn't hard to channel Steve's Bucky, but it was tiring and hard to know how much was too much. He must not have overstepped his bounds, because Steve held up his hands in surrender and backed out.

"If you need anything, yell for JARVIS."

"I won't."

"But yell—"

"Good_bye_ Steve."

Thank God, he left.

"Start the shower, J….ARVIS. JARVIS," Bucky said.

"You have to do that, sir," said the speaker, with a touch of smugness. This didn't seem right, machines shouldn't be able to be smug, but Bucky let it go and, with a bit of figuring, managed to turn on the shower.

"Is the room bugged?"

"I monitor the room, sir. There are no other devices."

"And you report to Stark?" He sat down on the toilet seat to wait for the shower to heat up. The light overhead had switched over to heat-lamp the moment the shower came on and he was comfortable, even waiting for the shower.

"Stark insists that I report what you are 'up to,' however, he is not interested in 'sneezes and farts,' JARVIS said.

"Are you telling him you're talking to me?"

"Not at present, sir. He is meeting with Ms. Hill."

"Good." A part of the Winter Soldier pulled out in front then – he didn't have to be Steve's Bucky with this robot, he could start completing the mission. "What was Dr…"

No. The name. The name. The name was the mission. He sat in silence, trying to remember it.

"JARVIS."

"Sir."

"What was the name of the doctor we talked about in Stark's office?"

"Dr. Johann Fennhoff, otherwise known as Dr. Faustus."

"What's his last known address?"

"I'm sorry, sir."

Ah. So there were some provisions in place. Bucky got in the shower, grateful for… everything a shower was. Baths were like the tank; they _weren't,_ he knew that logically, but there was that similarity. Showers were hot and ever-changing, you didn't fall asleep in a shower. The arm was waterproof but he had known that so long it felt silly to consciously think it. Of course his arm was waterproof. The whole Winter Soldier project was a massive waste of time if he could be shorted out by a dunk in the ocean.

"I know he lived in New York," Bucky said, over the sound of the water. "Give me his movements before that."

JARVIS apparently had no instructions on that, so the speaker went into a rundown of the psychiatrist's movements for the past decade. Bucky could figure out, knowing the association with Zola, what some of the movements were regarding. Nothing stood out, no bolt holes that he could remember, so he tried to remember everything the man had said leading up to the… trigger. In the background, he could hear his arm starting to get mad at the heat of the shower and the steam, whirring viciously, cutting out, then whirring viciously again. Let it. His lungs didn't mind the heat and the wet – this was the longest he had gone without coughing in weeks. Months?

No, focus, you were thinking about Faustus. Faustus.

"Sir?"

Bucky flinched to life at the inquiry. Someone pounded on the door, saying his name loudly, but the yelling person hadn't said his name. His skin felt wrinkled and dehydrated from the heat, his arm just a hissing, sad thing by his side. Steve was the one yelling.

"Copy…. JARVIS," he said.

"You have been standing in the shower for half an hour, sir, since you stopped responding."

"Bucky!" from outside the door.

"—And Mr. Rogers grew concerned."

"I'm fine, Cap."

He didn't say it loud enough—the man kept pounding. Easier to step out of the shower, go over to the door, and reassure the man than to yell. He moved to open the door and the arm let out a long, whistling whine, refusing to respond.

Fine, it had done this before; he opened the door with his other hand and stepped out. He quickly realized he only had the dirty clothes he had stepped in with. Putting them back on was pointless. There was the towel but— what would Steve's Bucky do?

"Steve, I need my damn clothes."

The pounding stopped. It had been a polite pounding. If Steve wanted IN, he would have just smashed the hell out of Stark's door and apologized later.

"You're okay?" Cap asked, voice muffled by the door.

"_Clothes_."

A pair of jeans and a cotton shirt were tossed in. Bucky had become used to jeans, a 1950s-era invention, but it was still weird to have them be the first thing anyone thought of for him to wear. Wasn't the point that he _wasn't_ going to run around doing heavy-duty things? Except for – ah, right. The ongoing hunt for… the man he had killed. Whatever his name was.

"JARVIS," he began, intending to ask the computer about the red-haired man's affiliations.

"Bucky."

He stopped in mid-stoop to pick up the shirt. "…what happened to 'sir'."

"My authorizations have been upgraded. Master Stark advised me that the best way to get your attention was to call you Bucky."

"Don't." He tried to pick up the shirt. His arm didn't move. "Stick to sir. Or soldier. Or…" He couldn't think of more words. "Not Bucky. Don't."

"Of course, sir."

Damn it, his arm wouldn't move. He concentrated on making his fingers move, realizing after a moment that he was sitting on the floor now, staring at his hand. Dead. The metal gleamed in the heat lamps of the bathroom, as much a part of him as a rock was part of a waterfall. Dead.

"Buck?" Steve said.

Get your damn pants on, soldier. Struggling, he managed to follow the internally-given order, even managing to button them. The shirt… _shirts, who needs shirts, I'm the Winter Soldier._

And a memory of Faustus emerged: _Really, Mr. Barnes, the only thing that has ever made you useful and worthwhile has been the winter soldier. The only time you were called upon and regarded as anything other than merely _human.

"Bucky, seriously, are you okay?" Steve asked. Damn it. Get up. He got up, pushed open the door and, intending to stride past Steve, almost fell onto the super soldier instead. Steve gripped him by the shoulders and stabilized him easily. If he noticed the dead arm, he didn't show it.

"Didn't you get a shirt?"

So he hadn't noticed. Bucky glanced over at the wall.

"Arm's dead. Stark should charge it."

"You want to take it off?" Steve asked, carefully.

"No."

"I'll help you get a shirt on then and we can—"

"_No_."

The tone held more venom than either of them had expected and Bucky tried to backtrack.

"Don't want… don't want anyone touching me. Don't want to be dressed." Eye contact was far too daunting a proposition, even if it was what Steve's Bucky would have done. "You get it?"

"I do. You in the mood for a meal, first?"

"No." Bucky stabilized himself against the doorway and shrugged, suppressing a cough. The change in air temperature was already doing a number on his lungs. "Just want to see the iron man."

Steve seemed frustrated. "You need to eat."

"You need sleep. Don't see you slowing down."

"...come on. We'll find Stark."

###

No, seriously, this is going somewhere, eventually. Hopefully, the journey there is entertaining.

Reviews are appreciated, though I'll probably keep updating until we get where we're going, regardless.


	7. Chapter 7

I'M BACK. ish. Back-ish. Long weekend.

EvelynHunters, thank you for the review! Sorry there hasn't been more on Bucky and Nat. ...much to my irritation, he's too unstable right now to do much in the way of remembering but hopefully that will stabilize, sorry rambling ... late nightish.).

#

Stark was knee-and-elbow deep in what looked like the upside-down undercarriage of a tank but actually proved to be a massive suit of armor. Steve appeared to take this in stride, though he did skirt the twin garbage-can sized hands, supermanned in front of the torso. Deep turquoise fires glowed deep in them.

"Stark!" Steve called loudly. It echoed through the armor.

"Y'know, I thought I made it clear Avengers ID's were not to be used to bypass 'do not disturb' signs unless something was on _fire_," Stark snarled, head invisible in the machinery.

"I could set something on fire," Steve suggested. "Bucky?"

The soldier's attention was wavering; it had been a very long, very chaotic day, but he knew this joke, at least.

"…'cn set something 'n fire."

"You brought—oh God." Stark stuck his head up out of the machinery and eyed the two of them. Grease covered his face, his hair looked as if it had recently suffered through a wind tunnel. "What's wrong now."

"The arm. It's—"

"Told you. Told you, told you, told you." With each mutter came a movement: one foot on the casing, the jump down, the stride over. "That's what you get for employing crap HYDRA tech on your super-soldiers. Pop it off, we'll take a look."

Bucky… hadn't expected that.

Should've, but hadn't.

"I'm not taking it off."

"It's a dead limb, Barnes. I can't charge it _on _you."

"They did."

"No they didn—what do you mean they did?" Stark grabbed the arm, lifted it, checked out the wiring and the energy source, flicking at it idly. Since the arm was dead, Bucky didn't stop him on instinct – which was a very, very good thing for Stark. "Okay, _no_, they _didn't_. They would have to run a charge through it for at least four hours every couple of months."

"So?"

"You're telling me they had you basically lean on a low-power electric fence for four hours?"

He was too tired at this point to recall much, but he did recall this. "You made weapons. Weapons take…" Pierce had called it something, Pierce had called him lots of things… "Forging."

"Whatever. I'm not charging it on you because the only thing I have recharges it _fast_. It'd kill you. So, off it comes."

He thought about protesting – _it's my arm, how are you going to get it back on, am I going to get it back on, what if I don't know how, without it I'm not the winter soldier I'm not Bucky I'm not anyone without it Steeeve…. _But mentally calling for Steve had done jacks_t over the years, so he said nothing. He just shook his head and let Stark, groaning and complaining, lead them to a further back portion of his lab, moaning about how shirtless assassins weren't allowed in his lab except, well, one, but Nat was elsewhere.

Stark stopped beside a medical-looking cot and slapped it with his hand. "Up. Gotta figure this out the hard way."

It didn't look like the chair, so he got up and sat. Steve lingered nearby, nervous but letting Stark do, more or less, whatever Stark wanted.

"Okay. So. To slow it down to 1940's tech which, for the record, is like trying to put your ipod's playlist onto a floppy disk, I'm going to run it through the same level of computation Zola was using."

"Explaining isn't your speed, Stark." Steve sounded puzzled. Bucky wasn't looking at them. "Why the lecture?"

"Look, I never did anything crazy to the magnet in my chest while it was still _in _me. Nothing that didn't need to be done. And Pepper usually did that. This thing? If it blows back, it could infect his whole system. I got whole body scans when he came in, I wouldn't even _consider _doing it this way if it weren't for him insisting."

Bucky could hear Steve's attention turn to him. "Buck… are you sure you don't want to take off the arm?"

If it got taken off and, at any time, he fell asleep, he might never get it back. Stark wanted the arm. The Winter Soldier had heard need and interest in enough voices to recognize that. Stark wanted to be able to replicate the arm or maybe he just wanted to replace it with his own, superior technology, but what if that was a way to tie Bucky to him too? People wanted the asset.

It wasn't hubris, it was fact. Attempts had been made, offers had been proposed, his opinion was _not relevant_.

"It stays," he said bluntly.

"See? Crazy." Stark plugged a cable into the charging socket of the arm, rolled his eyes, and walked over to a monitor hooked up to a giant box. "You're lucky I didn't hollow this thing out for Barton's pet iguana yet."

"Dog." Steve's reproof was amused. "He has a dog."

"Whatever, it pees on my carpet and gets in my lab. Goes in a box."

The computer made a whooshing noise and came on. Steve glanced over at Bucky, who glanced in turn at the cable. The arm was dead as ever. He closed his eyes and waited for what invariably accompanied 'charging.' Then a pulse came through, faint at first, then growing in power. Bucky relaxed when it leveled off, a constant and steady thrum of power that didn't hurt. Accustomed to pain, he never felt the sting of a needle in his neck.

#

Steve arranged the unconscious assassin on the cot then glanced over at Stark. "…he is sleeping, right?"

"It's going to take eight hours to get that thing charged at this rate. At that dose, he should sleep ten. Biometric scanners said enough of the drugs are out of his system, he'll be fine. Doc's going to come in and put in a monitored IV so he'll start getting nutrients. We've got bigger problems." He pulled up a screen above the ancient computer, showing a map of the city. "I sent Banner to go get shwarma. He never came back."

"Stop joking, Stark. Where is the doctor?"

"Possibly? With our other doctor. Banner's Avengers ID was last sighted heading west. No reports of a big green guy but Banner's gotten good at turning his card off when he needs to. Whiiiich is all the time. He was concerned about Faustus getting away and about Prisoner-Zero over there when he left. Plus…"

"Plus what?"

The door to the lab creaked open. Both of them turned to look – and watch as a yellow dog of indeterminate breed nosed its way into the room and padded over to them. Stark sighed heavily.

"As you can see, Barton went with him. And if there's anybody with a bone to pick about mind control, it's Barton. Working together, they could take this guy out before we ever get a hold of him."

"Do they know about the triggers?"

"Yeah, so they'll do their best, but if Banner makes a sciency-enough argument for killing Faustus, or just HULK-SMASHES him, Barton isn't going to be able to stop him."

"So we have to go."

"'We,' being…"

"Me, you, Buck-"

"Someone has to hold down the fort. Nat's out on business, Pepper has been stuck at Stark Industries in talks with Kronos. Last time I ditched her with an unconscious assassin, she sent four suits out with the dry cleaning. 'Suits with the suits'. They still haven't come back. And now Nat knows virtually everything about me."

"So me and Bucky."

"Cap. He's not stable. And you haven't slept."

"He's getting better. And I slept decades. I think I'm good."

"Yes, but in the meantime, you gotta take somebody or I'm not giving you Barton's position."

"Sam." Steve chose on a whim but it was really the only logical choice. Sam was good with people. Sam had calmed Bucky down last night when Steve's opening act, after decades apart, had been (necessarily) to try and incapacitate his friend. Multiple times.

He glanced back at Stark, who had crossed the lab to greet the doctor coming in with the IV. Maybe it was better Stark wasn't coming. Everything in Bucky's body language had said the man was terrifying and, even if they were going on a hunt for Banner and the archer across the country, maybe it was better not to take someone terrifying to an assassin.

#

whoops. yeah. y'know when it's the holidays and work explodes and uh yeah. At least I know where, uh, this is going. Holy crap, Banner and Barton were not supposed to go multiplayer and run off.

Reviews are happily read!


	8. Chapter 8

#

When Bucky woke up, he took stock of his surroundings. No panic yet, because he had become accustomed to drifting off during the charging procedure as part of pain management. No one working on him cared if he slept, because he wasn't _doing_ anything.

Plus, they were probably too terrified of him to ask if he was blacking out repeatedly. No, that question went to the neuroscientists— who all gave him passing mental grades or they would lose their jobs.

So. Surroundings. High ceiling, comfortable lighting. Decent cot. A machine going 'beep' next to him. Something alive lying across his legs – between thirty and fifty pounds, it kept shifting. Both of his arms moved when he pushed his weight up on them to get a look at it – the metal arm was fully charged, good.

The alive thing –a dog— lifted its head and looked back at him. Somebody's pet, no attack dog this. It licked its nose and continued staring. The machine began beeping gently. He glanced down at his hand, where the other end of an IV had been inserted. Sticky notes covered his hand, having been taped on to prevent them from falling off.

There was no way he had slept through the insertion of an IV. Damn it, the iron man had drugged him! He went to tear the IV off, then saw the words DON'T PANIC at the beginning of the post-it. Groaning, he held up his metal hand to read the series of notes.

**DON'T PANIC**

**And leave it in. It's putting nutrients and antibiotics back in you. Steve says you're going to hate us both for this. **[new post-it note, new handwriting] **Buck, you needed medical help. This might've been wrong but… **[new post-it note, old handwriting] **But I can live with it. Medical help. That's all we did. Now, JARVIS should have noticed you're reading by now and alerted me to you being awake, so I should be—**

"Good morning, sunshine," the iron man said, striding into the room.

The dog was lying on his legs and refused to move, so Bucky sat up slowly. Surprisingly, he didn't feel… bad. It was a strange feeling—without exhaustion, without a wet need to cough, or the dull pain in his—oh. He had on a knee brace.

"You drugged me," Bucky said, careful to get the words right. He wanted to bend the knee, test and make sure it was still all _his_, but the dog was lying on it and had no intention of moving.

"And you have my formal apology for that," Stark answered as he approached the cot. "Namely because Steve says apologies are important. It was going to be much more comfortable for you to be sleeping when we set your leg, inserted the IV, and ran a full diagnostic. To say nothing of the arm charging."

What if he had wanted to be awake? The thought of what could have happened while he was asleep – who Stark _could_ be working for – the thought that Steve could have been changed or mind-controlled or something and delivering him back to his handlers… _so much could have happened and how did he know it hadn't and this was all –_ then he realized Stark was talking in a controlled, even voice. A steady drone which punctured the spiral of terror.

"Keep breathing. Nothing happened while you were asleep. Everything is fine. Steve's in another part of the tower. The dog is friendly even if it has an uncontrollable bladder and its name is Lucky. You can pet it, it would probably enjoy the attention. Steve's in the tower and nothing has happened to him, or to anyone else, and you are under Stark hospitality for what that's worth and that's certainly something to be confident about, but keep breathing, no one's done anything to you that didn't help you since you went to sleep. Pet the dog, it's been statistically proven to improve mood or at least it probably is, I haven't run the numbers in a while."

Bucky stared. Startled out of the doom-spiral of fear.

"…what? I can recognize panic." Stark pushed himself away from the cot, checking the vitals on the computer with a few quick keystrokes. "The arm is charged, you can unplug. The IV, I'd like you to keep in."

"…knee brace. IV. Useless this way."

"Steve disagrees. For that matter, I disagree. Finding a friend of Steve's, our resident Cap-sicle, isn't useless."

"He already has people," Bucky said.

"There is _no one else_ Steve's age from the '40s. We are running out of WWII survivors in general. Steve has 'people,' he doesn't have anyone like you."

Bucky said nothing, so Tony went on, making movements on the screen, moving things from one side to the other.

"Unfortunately, he seems to assume you're just as indestructible as you were in the forties, so he's wants you to come on the 'hunt-down-Faustus' trip, doubling as a 'hunt-down-renegade-Avengers-idiots' trip."

"Steve's not going anywhere with me." Panic started to spiral again. "Steve can't go anywhere with me. That's f_ing obvious."

"Cap is going with you," Stark said with absolute confidence. "And Falcon is going with you both. Those two took down HYDRA, as Avengers we took down Loki and an entire alien race hell-bent on invasion. I think they can handle a whackjob psychologist."

"I'm not—"

"Look, nobody's safe around Banner either. Which is who they're going to stop. I wouldn't send you, but Cap didn't exactly give me a vote because he told me what he was going to do, _in detail_, if I tried to keep you here against your will."

"… you don't…."

"Seem like the type to listen? No. But it looks good for PR when Cap's on my side."

"So…" Bucky was losing the conversation again. "So what are you doing?"

"You've got three days. Steve's not going to let you keel over in pursuit of Faustus, given that the guy isn't an intergalactic threat. I recommend you sleep. A lot."

"I don't need to—"

"Yeah, y'do. Buttsniffer?" This last was addressed to the dog, whose tail happily started thumping the cot again. "Make sure he stays."

Thump thump thump.

"Good." Still addressing the dog. "Still haven't forgiven you for Tuesday."

And that was how Bucky left things with Stark.

#

Every time he woke up, he remembered more. It took less time to come back to himself, because there was a 'himself' to come back to. The dog had adopted him, more or less, even when he moved from Stark's lab to the bedroom Steve had originally showed him. It was 'his' and the dog didn't find it weird that he slept on the floor, deciding instead that it meant an awful lot of bedspace for Dog.

Remembering.

That passed in and out like a radio station. He still hadn't really talked to Steve, though it was coming. He could feel conversations on the horizon, things that Steve wanted to ask him or tell him that went beyond 'how are you,' 'shouldn't you eat,' and other questions with difficult answers.

The knee brace helped. He didn't want to admit that. The knee brace helped. And he was on antibiotics, so the cough and the inflammation around his shoulder were slowly, _slowly_ leaving.

A pathetic sort of soldier.

_That_ hurt. Realizing that there was a sizeable part of him that didn't feel he was any good unless he was of use and realizing, upon carefully broaching the subject with Steve, that it wasn't a part that was going to go away. 'Decades of use,' Steve had said, 'and they didn't treat you like a human being. Buck, there are people – soldiers – going through post-service struggles now who haven't even been through what you have, and _they're_ struggling to adjust. It's going to take... time.'

Though, as he was reminded at every turn, he had support which other veterans didn't. He could live at Stark Tower for as long [probably] as he needed; he could eat at Stark Kitchens where there was a professional staff; Jarvis knew where he was at all times if he got into trouble. All of that just conspired to remind him that he was an enemy of the state. And had been. For decades. He didn't deserve this.

The night of the second full day, Steve made sure Bucky was safely in his room, made sure he took something to help with sleep, and left. The door whirred and locked behind the super soldier, as it had both of the preceding nights. It wasn't intentional, it wasn't mean-spirited, it was just... the situation.

The Winter Soldier promptly tossed the pills, put the knee brace back on, and opened the window. Stark had left him alone in the lab again that day. It was the work of moments, with HYDRA's training, to get everything he needed: Barton's last-known-position and access to Jarvis's surveillance in his bedroom.

Lucky watched him from the bed, interested but not interested enough to follow him out the window. Barton had probably trained it not to come careening after people when they went out windows, or Hawkeye would go through a lot of dogs.

Good, then.

If all went as planned, nobody would come careening after Bucky, including Steve.

It took some doing, but he got out of his room, quietly broke the window of one two floors down (where he had also disabled security), and broke back in. The door there was unlocked. Exiting the tower after that was easy, compared to some of the places he'd gotten in and out of. By the time he was walking out into the moonlight, he had only just started limping and it was slight. He could keep going as long as he needed to.

The first cab driver that stopped probably thought he was going to get a huge tip, picking up a fare in this area, this late. Maybe even give a lift to Captain America.

"Where to?" the man asked as the door opened.

"Nearest bus station."

The man obligingly pulled onto the public streets then, with a final glance in the rearview mirror, joked:

"Going to the bus station this time of night, coming out of the hero-tower, and you aren't taking back-up?"

"I am back-up."

The statement –once true, now false, but true again – sent him into a mental tail-spin, which Bucky didn't surface from until the cab stopped in front of the bus station. In his confusion and hurry to get out of the vehicle, the taxi driver got a $50 tip.

"Thanks, Cap!" the man cheered as Bucky slammed the door. Gah. It took the rest of his energy to get on the bus for Chesapeake Bay, where Barton and Banner would be doing… whatever it was they were doing. Six to eight hours on the bus was like another day of recuperation and, if the pair had found Faustus by the time he got there, so much the better.

#

For anyone who knows Bucky from the comics, he DOES do this kind of idiotic thing. Like training with broken ribs and calling himself a 'fast healer.' [argh, Buck, why.]

To anyone who has hung in there to read this drabble thus far [and to those who've reviewed], y'know what, you're cool. And I hope it amuses. :) Fighting the urge to replot and rewrite the whole thing but I just don't got the time right now, so I'm gonna plunge forward while I still want to tell this story. Cheers, and thank you.


	9. Chapter 9

Happy New Year and sorry I vanished. (Also, I got the new omnibus for Trial of Captain America and oh my Lord, aaaaaall the Bucky feels…) But I got this written, so here's some Hawkeye and Hulk being clandestine and maybe where this story is going! (Also, I got the first book of Hawkeye, so cheers to anyone seeing the winks in here)

Thank you to everyone who reads and everyone who reviewed. 3 I love feedback. Also, holy crap, did anyone else notice how many bloody B names there are in this? I didn't even. Barton, Bucky, Banner. If I were calling James 'Buchanan', that'd be one more… sorry guys. Can't change it now, so I'm plowin forward.

#

The front desk attendant paid little attention to the two men who came in just after 3pm – they were two of legion on the Friday afternoon. By their conversation, it was clear they were here for the taller one's book tour about soil in Antarctica and they were travelling on a budget. She directed Don Janes and Rolf Whitehead to their room on the second floor and thought no more about them.

-which was exactly as Clint had planned.

"Nothing in the minibar," Banner noted from the far side of their two-bed room. Clint didn't glance up from unfolding the map; he knew the layout of the room already. It had a minibar, two beds, and a sliding glass door leading onto a small balcony. It was nice to have a quick escape route if things went the kind of south where ninjas showed up to kill you in your hotel room. The balcony 'view' overlooked a parking lot, good view of the freeway, but way off beyond that, you could almost see the ocean.

"Can't drink right now anyway." He finished spreading out a map of the city on the floral bedspread. Neither of them knew Chesapeake well and it would have been easier to take a taxi to Faustus's offices then drive the car they had brought from Manhattan. They needed a car for a meeting like this though. Needed to be able to get away fast.

"Doctor's offices are on 409th. You want to drive?"

"I want to take another look at the plan." Banner sat down on the opposite bed. "Are you _sure _you want to do this, Clint? You have Stark thinking the whole thing is my idea when you're the one who hasn't sat down since Bucky got in."

"…"

"And I'm only here because you stole my car."

"Well, mine was—"

"That's why you don't pay for Dodge Challengers in cash to women you just slept with." Banner went silent all of a sudden, focusing on the dresser in an effort to return to social nicety. "Point is, you're bringing the Avengers into this."

"You see masks? And you didn't answer the question." Clint was following a street on the map with a finger, noting its twists and turns.

"You really want me driving."

"It's your car."

"It's a bad idea."

Clint kept following the street, saying nothing until he stopped, a long way from where he had started, took out a pen, and put a circle with some dashes on their destination. Then, added a couple of others in case someone got a hold of the map. Then 'folded' the map into something that came out looking like a 6-year-old's Christmas present for mommy. Probably should answer Banner.

"Look, Cap's friend came in accused of murder, half-dead on top of that. Nobody lookin' out. That pisses me off. Cap's not gonna hunt anyone down til Stark gives the okay and Stark's not gonna give the okay until hell freezes over in Shield-land. Cap will keep his people safe. That's what Cap does. We're going to clear the airways."

"If Avengers are in this, you can't kill this guy," Banner said, tone solemn.

"Who said I was killin'—"

"Ever since New York last year, you go off at the slightest hint of mind control. Cap's friend, Selvig, the man in the subway back in January—"

"_That was different."_

"You wanted me here because you think he can't control me. If you're wrong, I could break him. Break his apartment complex and most of this nice little resort town."

"So you're driving?" Clint shoved the map into a pocket. Banner seemed about to say something else, sighed, then nodded.

"Fine, I'm driving."

"Good, you need gas."

#

The building had been recently built, emulating the appearance of the rectangular Chesapeake City Hall. A sheer beige wall stood before Barton and Bruce, either side of the building made up of paneled windows reflecting the grey-white sky of the day. Parking had been easy, though Bruce walked through the arched door of the office building muttering 'they better validate this.'

According to the directory just inside, there were 4 psychologists' offices, 2 psychiatrists, a pharmacy, and half a dozen other medical plaza specialists in the building.

"310," Barton decided. "Different name but the plating's newest."

"Die in one state, come down and live in another," Bruce mused. It seemed like a good way to get rid of Tony's interference, only Tony was fun to be around in a chaotic kind of way.

"Yeah, I already don't like this guy," Barton said and headed for the stairs, rather than the gold-doored elevator. Bruce followed him, somewhat bemused by the action. If they really were here for a conversation – well, they weren't. They had brought a getaway car, for crying out loud; this was probably going to go terribly.

"Gotta knew where stairs are," the bowman said as he pulled open the stairwell door. "Already checked the outside paneling and there's three ways down from the 3rd floor."

"Remember when Steve told everyone not to put me in stressful situations? Gosh, that was fun."

"This isn't stressful, it's a shrink," Barton replied and pushed open the door at the top of the stairs. The pair stepped out into a short carpeted hallway. No windows here, but the domed lights overhead cast a golden glow over the corridor. Barton took a few quick steps down the hall and opened door 310.

"Professor—er, Doc? Doc. Seifert?" he called. "I had an appointment?"

"Travis, you're early!"

The doctor came to the door and ushered them both in, leaving no doubt that this was Faustus. The magnificent red beard he had had in the mall was trimmed much shorter; he wore no glasses, and the hair was trending much closer to gray, but it was hard to disguise a man of his build and bearing. Then again—

"Good to meet you, doc, I've been assigned 6 months of counseling because I—"

"You recognized me, Agent Barton," Faustus interrupted. "As did Dr. Banner here. I know who you are."

The bowman didn't blink but Bruce could see him running through alternate scenarios in his mind.

"Agent Barton, if I do not want to be found or seen, I am not found or seen. Your morgue attendants can –or rather cannot – attest to that."

"Why would you want to, then?" Barton challenged.

"To tender a message. You two were not supposed to follow me down but, since you have, you must carry it or my actual quarry won't follow."

"Why would you fake your own death?"

"I needed to test if James's order to never kill me would hold. Regrettably, the only way to test this was to test his order to kill Captain America specifically. You understand?"

"Sounds like a death wish. Why would he try to kill you anyway?"

"Because, when we were working with the Winter Soldier, tabula rasa, Zola and I, I promised James that a day would come when our direction of Hydra would fall – I could see it, even then – and if he kept loyal to me, never killed me, I could get his memories back. We didn't erase them, you know. We built over them, hundreds of times, cities beneath cities like Rome, Paris, Seattle, London. The triggers keep the old cities at bay."

Barton was livid. Quiet as a knife but Bruce could feel him seething like a kettle left hours on the stove.

"Agent Barton, why don't you go look out the window?" Faustus suggested, having noticed the same fury. Tension eased out of Barton's face and the bowman went to the window, looking down at the street below. Bruce took his fury and put it somewhere else – down a hole he kept in the back of his mind, anything to keep from feeding the beast.

"I don't appreciate shows of power," he said, voice even. "How about you tell me the message and we go?"

"If James wants him memories back, or his handlers of the week do, I want a monthly meeting with Tony Stark, as soon as he's head of Shield. Or before, if he would like my advice."

At first, it didn't seem unreasonable. Then it did. Oh God, it did.

"You want Shield as your puppet?" Bruce asked, keeping an eye on Barton.

"I could handle it far better than those ham-fisted fools of Hydra."

"There's no way Stark's going to let you do that."

"Agent Barton, would you be so good as to open the window?" the doctor asked. His back was to Barton; Faustus didn't even have to turn to see the bowman do it. There was noise enough as confirmation – the sound of the latch clicking, then another – a window grating upwards. Fury turned from the hole in Bruce's mind and began climbing back up the tunnel like a dog laboriously dragging a bone.

"Are you trying to make me angry?" Bruce asked quietly.

"No, I'm trying to make you understand. Your mind is terribly pliable, but you don't act on what you think. Agent Barton is terrified of being controlled – so terrified that he'll do what he is told to stop it from happening, take orders from anyone… including me."

"I'll deliver the message. Leave him alone."

"Agent Barton, there's a draft. Could you close the window?"

Barton appeared to come to himself, looking at the window, then back at Faustus, full of snark.

"Close it yourself. And grab your evil cape, we're leaving."

"Oh, actually, we're not," Bruce said. The bowman blinked at him, a trace of puzzlement passing over his face.

"Pretty sure we are, Rolf."

"Well, _we're_ leaving. But not with him."

Barton looked from one to the other. "Uhhh… why?"

"He made a _very convincing argument_. So we're going."

Faustus chose that moment to chime in. "And could you show my next patient in on your way out? I'm trying to build my case load and it sets a bad precedent to go long."

" 'course," Barton muttered as they walked out, deliberately shutting the door behind them. A 20-something young man with a Navy crewcut stood waiting in the hallway. As they passed him, Barton gripped him by the shoulder – "that guy's a quack" – let go, and kept walking.

Then, on their way to the elevator, he glanced over at Banner:

"What the hell happened?"

#

Following the validation of parking, Barton led the way to a Thai joint around the corner, where they made friends with at least one of the other tenants of the psych building (a blonde woman in her thirties who heard Banner talking about hypnosis). Finally, full of tom yam and massaman curry, they went back to the hotel.

"I turned off Stark's auto-locator, so you get to tell him," Bruce said, zipping the keycard in and out of the door. "See if he wants to bring someone high-profile down to out the guy."

"He's not doing anything illegally by living." Barton stepped forward and pushed open the door, entering first. "I got personal experience with that and until we have evidence, cops won't be interested and Stark will shrug." A hand came up. Bruce stopped immediately in the entry corridor, his view partially blocked by the corner of the hotel room. Still, he could see a man in a black jacket and cap sitting in the corner chair. The sliding glass door stood slightly ajar behind him. Shadows cloaked most of his features.

Barton moved in cautiously, heading for the dresser across from the intruder. The man was dozing, quieter than he had any right to be. The archer pulled his bow silently from behind the dresser and notched an arrow from behind the TV to the string. Keeping the bow angled slightly down, he motioned Bruce farther back with his head. Bruce ignored him but Barton wasn't facing him.

"Hey," Barton called softly. "Bucky."

The Winter Soldier looked up and did a threat assessment in seconds. Bow, arrow, Barton, Banner, sliding door, distance. Moving as methodically as Barton had a minute before, he sat up, set two guns and a knife on the floor, and leaned back again.

"Where's the doctor?" he asked. His voice sounded less death-warmed-over than it had when Bruce saw him last, but there was a rasp and a cough to it. The man wasn't well, but he was clearly well enough to get _here_.

"We're negotiating," Barton said. "Does Sta—does Cap know you're here?"

"No, Steve had me on bedrest," Bucky replied. That phrasing – Bruce thought about it and realized, suddenly, that the assassin had read their files somehow. Somehow, Bucky knew that Barton hated bedrest and would understand, more than anyone, why it was unacceptable for the 'merely human' to be on bedrest while the superheroes ran around intact. Barton regularly got his butt handed to him without even changing into costume and did more travelling for personal justice-dealing-with-bad-guys reasons than was physically safe.

To Barton's credit, the bow didn't lower.

"Probably a good reason for that," the bowman said.

"This is my problem. Not Cap's. Not… the iron man's."

He'd forgotten Stark's name, Bruce thought. For a moment, Bucky had forgotten the iron man was Tony Stark.

"So you came down," Bruce said, stepping into the room. The assassin's eyes followed him.

"Did you find Faustus?"

Did he have to repeat that name to keep it in his mind? How long could he hold a new name before it became part of the drifting miasma of memory in Bucky's mind? Did it depend on how much he liked or disliked the person?

"He has some conditions before he'll talk to anyone," Bruce replied. "It's become a Stark issue."

"It _isn't_ a Stark issue," Bucky snarled. He didn't move though, didn't get up.

"A Shield issue then. If you went, he'd tell you the same thing."

"No one ever tells me the same thing," the assassin said and there was a blade in the words – a real and palpable threat. Tell me the truth or things will start happening here.

"Then at least wait for Steve to catch up with us," Bruce said. "If you came by bus, you've been up all night. Barton will make a call to Cap, they'll come down and make movements _legally_. I don't want any… stress, and you don't need any more heat on you."

There was a threat in Bruce's words too, if the Winter Soldier could catch it, and Bucky seemed to. His handlers had probably known enough to teach him not to go up against the Hulk in close quarters and the assassin wasn't stupid. He thought about the statement a moment, then nodded. Thank God, at least that had gone off according to plan.

"Did you bring medications? The stuff the doctor was—" Bruce began.

"None of your business."

Probably just the antibiotics and the stimulants then; no painkillers or sleeping aids. Great, they could share the hotel room with a wired Winter Soldier. Damn it, Cap.

"Barton, you want to—"

"Calling," the bowman answered, putting the bow back behind the dresser. In the meantime, the ghost of the intelligence community had drifted back into his nap – knife in hand. Looked like Bruce wasn't going to be getting any sleep tonight.

If the Winter Soldier hadn't broken into _this_ hotel room with such ease, he would have seriously considered getting another.

#

Longer chapter this time, but you guys definitely deserve it for waiting. Thanks for reading!


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